


The Law of Equivalent Exchange

by seraphcelene



Series: Ceremonies of Light and Dark [3]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Gen, Implied/Referenced Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-27
Updated: 2010-04-27
Packaged: 2018-05-25 06:48:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6184825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seraphcelene/pseuds/seraphcelene
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Humankind cannot gain anything without first giving something in return. To obtain, something of equal value must be lost. That is Alchemy's First Law of Equivalent Exchange." Here is the whimper. This is how it ends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Law of Equivalent Exchange

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: It's the end of a series. One Thousand Kisses Deep tells the beginning of the whole mess. Thine is, Life is chronologically second, but was written first. Title and summary of this final segment is courtesy of Full Metal Alchemist.
> 
> Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all related characters belong to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, the Warner Company, UPN et al. I’m just taking them out for a little exercise.

"What will we miss of our skin and gristle?  
Our disengaged hearts. When you're finally  
no one, what else do you call out but your name?"  
\-- _Andrew Michael Roberts_ , **The World Wakes Up**

 

**I. Dawn**

Everything is the beginning of something until it's the end, and there is Dawn on the floor of the bathroom dipping fingers into a puddle the impossibly dark red of black currant. The leading edge bleeds against the white tile and stains Dawn's thigh where it meets the floor. She sits with her legs folded cross, her back against the bathtub and Faith lies draped across the cradle of her lap.

"I am a girl," Dawn says and presses a kiss onto Faith's forehead. She stares at Faith like looking into a fun-house mirror, the reflection distorted but familiar. Here are two eyes and a mouth. Here is the nose. Here is every face she's ever had, every girl she's ever been. Once, they were legion.

Dawn finger-paints stars and crescent moons onto the familiar rise of Faith's cheekbones. Somewhere in Faith's still face there is a beginning (birth, calling, corruption), but it has become tangled with too many endings (calling, murder, redemption). Lost in the star-field behind her eyes, Dawn doesn't hear the creak of the outer door or the tread of footsteps. She is intent upon repairing a smear in the universe carefully mapped across the body in her lap.

"Dawnie?"

"Dawnie," she repeats and looks up. Willow could have said 'Faith' or 'Buffy' and the response would have been the same. That's how endings are sometimes, a mere echo of what went before. Once, Dawn was a beginning, they all were, but now she is become the end for everyone.

"Shit!" Oona stands behind Willow and peers into the room.

"Oh, god. Dawn, what did you do?" Willow asks. It's a stupid, rhetorical question. It doesn't require an answer because it's obvious.

"The question is false," Dawn replies. She knows that she's never really been part of the equation, only the solution. "I keep dying, but I'm here."

Willow kneels beside her, avoids the blood seeping sluggishly across the floor. She reaches out to touch Dawn's face and stops, her hand hovering over Dawn's cheek. A spark jumps between them and the air reeks with the lingering electric burn of ozone and nitrous oxide.

"Where's Buffy?" she asks.

"Willow, I think I'm dying," Dawn says. Without looking down, she slides a hand across Faith's dark, matted hair. Leaning closer to Willow she whispers, "I don't think this is me."

 

**II. Buffy**

Buffy stands at the window counting the dwindling lights in the city. Four years in the crucible and the conflagration has burned out to smoldering ash and ruin. Across the divide between now and then, the two halves of the city split by the gaping maw of the Hellmouth cratered in its center, Buffy remembers the beginning (youth, sunshine, lollipops). Beginnings that inevitably became endings (death, blood, sex). In the courtyard below, the Jasmine has run wild and no one comes to the door anymore.

"I can't see you," Dawn says from the bed. Her legs are drawn up and she picks at the ragged edges of her toe nails.

Buffy doesn't respond, touches the small jar balanced on the window's ledge instead. It is black porcelain painted with flowers of white, pink and blue. "I'm the chosen one," she finally says. And that is another way the story begins.

Dawn unfolds herself from the bed, all long-limbed pink and white nakedness. She crosses to where Buffy stands in front of the window and slides her arms around Buffy's waist from behind. Dawn rests her chin on Buffy's shoulder, and the window reflects the truth within the lie (completeness, a monster, siamese twins).

"One of many," Dawn says. "Half of a whole. They made me out of you." She presses a kiss into the curve where Buffy's neck slides into her shoulder. "Don't forget that."

"They made me out of you," Buffy repeats (sister, daughter, lover). "I remember that. And Heaven. I think I remember Heaven."

Dawn closes her eyes, her face pressed into the spill of Buffy's hair. "There was light and peace," she says. "We were done."

"I wish ..." Buffy whispers.

"If wishes were horses," Dawn replies.

"I'd be in Heaven or I wouldn't have been born."

"But what about the slayer?"

"Another girl in another town."

"What about me? There would be no me. No us."

Buffy sighs at that and shrugs, Dawn's reflection rises and falls with the motion. "You're not a real girl, anyway."

Despite many false starts the story has to end and Buffy isn't surprised by the flash of the knife. It's shadow reflection arcs in the window. Some knowing is a gift of blood and bone. The universe has to right itself sooner or later. One who became two and then two again, split and doubled (mother, daughter, twin).

Buffy remembers the way that Angel died. They were standing in front of the window watching the sun rise. Faith beat the flames from Buffy's clothes before they spread.

Buffy tilts back her head as Dawn's hand slides up to cover her eyes. "Dawn, I love you," she says. She covers Dawn's hand with her own.

The knife slips easily across the tenderness of Buffy's throat. Dawn's hold tightens and she slides to the floor as Buffy's body sinks. The jar, balanced precariously on the window's ledge, shatters as it hits the ground.

Everything is the beginning of something until it's the end, and there is Dawn on the floor by the window, her pink and white nakedness stained red. She is stronger than she looks. Every girl who died flooded the line with power. Dawn is the end; Buffy, the beginning.

Dawn dips her fingers into the blood collecting in the bony cup of Buffy's collarbone. She finger-paints stars and crescent moons across the familiar planes of her sister's face.

"They made you out of me," she says and kisses Buffy forehead. Buffy's heart lies discarded by her hip, coated with ashes amid the shards of a broken porcelain jar.

 

**III. Faith**

"Why are you here?" Dawn asks.

Faith blinks slowly, her eyes nearly too heavy to open. She's lying curled in the bathtub and when she opens her eyes all she sees is an expanse of poreless white. The bathroom is cold, but she likes it that way. It's the end of the world, or just after, and outside is all fire and cherry blossoms. Occasionally she used to lie spread-eagle in a patch of sun that streamed in through the bedroom window. When she got too hot, sweat beading across her forehead and upper lip, she would think of Angel burning and move back to the icy cradle of the bathtub.

Now she says, "There's blood in the carpet," and listens to her voice echoing against the porcelain.

"Yeah," Dawn murmurs. "I can't get it out."

Faith doesn't think that she's tried. The stain is too dark and heavy in the carpet.

"But why are you here?" Dawn asks again and her voice is closer, drifting down from where she stands beside the tub. "I don't understand."

Faith is a broken doll abandoned in the corner of the room. Forgotten in a jail cell, in a coma, in a trailer park half-way to nowhere. She is accustomed to being an afterthought, a shadow. Buffy was the beginning, the center, and for a moment Faith reveled in the flavor of being a sister, lover, friend. Now, she is forgotten, again. She's lost her face, they all did. Washed out in endless circles by the ebb and tide of dying slayers, Faith went mad first. Too close to the source, too close to the bridge between the beginning and the girls who came after, she spiraled down into the fist that killed. Faith survives, she exists in the space between beginning and end.

Faith rolls over slightly to look up and Dawn's eyes are glittering jet as she stares down into the tub.

"I see eternity." Dawn smiles as she brushes the hair back from Faith's forehead.

This ending was only a matter of time.

 

**IV. Willow**

"Where's the Slayer?" Oona leans against the doorway to the bedroom, her back to the mess on the bathroom floor.

"They're all slayers," Willow says. She pulls a blanket over Dawn's naked shoulder. Dawn isn't sleeping, her black, pupil-less eyes stare unblinking at the bedroom wall.

Oona laughs and the sound is a sharp crack in the quiet room. "They're an abomination. What's left of them, anyway. Where's Buffy?"

Willow shakes her head. "I don't know. I don't understand. She should be here. The spell is very specific. I look at Dawn and it should be Buffy."

"This is not good."

"Thanks for stating the obvious." Willow sits on the bed beside Dawn who lays curled on her side.

Oona continues to slouch in the doorway, bored. "The spell is no good." She takes a deep breath, smelling the magic in the air. "I doubt very much that it was ever good."

Willow knows Oona isn't talking about the locator spell. "There was no way of knowing that it wouldn't work. I mean, how would we know. We had to do something."

"There are rules, Willow. You are very good at ignoring rules." Oona shrugs. "Not that it matters," she says. "Intel indicates that most of the slayers in the city are dead, and the Hellmouth is inactive."

Everything is the beginning of something until its the end.

Oona pushes away from the door and moves to stand beside Willow. They look down at Dawn lying curled upon the bed. There is the faintest cast of neon on her skin; she almost glows. Oona reaches down to touch Dawn's cheek. A spark jumps between them and the air reeks with the lingering electric burn of ozone and nitrous oxide.

"You should be grateful," Oona says, rubbing away the sting between forefinger and thumb. "The spell will eventually fall apart. Chloe foresaw it. She warned you. Be grateful that this is all the universe asks of you. The Hellmouth is closed and the spell is dead." She tilts her chin gently in Dawn's direction. "This will soon return to whence it came. All will be as it was meant to be."

Willow presses her lips tightly together, her eyes bright with unshed tears. "But, Buffy. Dawn."

Oona shrugs again and turns away, "You can't get something for nothing," she says.

 

 

End.


End file.
